career-transition

Our career-transition services are intended for anyone who wants to make their career, or life more generally, more as they would like it to be. It is based around a four-stage process:

1. Who am I?
2. Where am I now?
3. Where do I want to go?
4. How am I going to get there?

Career Transition - Who am I?

The initial "Who Am I?" stage usually incorporates some diagnostics, analysis and reflection. The basic idea is to get a good understanding of one's personal qualities, skills, attributes, strengths, motivations and values - to develop self-awareness, or as the ancient Greeks said "know thyself", "γνϖθ ι σεαυτον", "gnōthi seavton". In essence, the identification of these fundamentals provides the foundations on which the rest of the process is built.

In order to help people clarify their thinking on these issues, they usually undertake some psychometric assessments. They may also spend time reflecting on what they really want from work and seek feedback about themselves from informed sources, such as previous work mates and managers, colleagues and even friends, partners and other family members.

One frequently used instrument is "Strengthscope" , www.strengthscope.com. This is a strengths-assessment tool that provides a comprehensive measure of an individual's strengths and the extent to which these are productively applied at work. Strengths in this context are not just about competence or competencies (i.e. how good you are at something or what qualities you need to do your job). Instead, they relate to underlying qualities or personality characteristics that "energise" you and make you feel stronger when you use them at work.

The notion of adopting a "strengths-focused approach" has a long history, recently gaining momentum through the positive psychology movement. Its roots are diverse and span management science, psychology, and philosophy.

Strengthscope provides a model and measure of strengths that is directly relevant to 21st century organisations. The tool's twenty-two strengths are shown below:

Career Transition - Where am I now?

The second "Where am I Now?" stage introduces the Workbook component to the programme. Everyone who signs up for the programme gets their own copy of the Workbook, which contains a number of exercises. These are usually completed prior to a meeting with your career-coach. (The meeting itself can be face-to-face, over the phone or even via Skype video-conference, according to your preference).

Please click here to view a testimonial from a recent user of this service.

The exercises at this stage included:

• Confidence Activity - by focusing on your achievements and successes, this exercise is designed to boost your self-esteem and confidence.
• Career Lifeline - this exercise is intended to help you to review significant milestones and events in your career to date in order to help you plan and achieve your desired future career goals.
• Career Wheel - this exercise helps you identify what is currently important to you in your career and how satisfied you are with these things.
• Skills Inventory - this exercise is intended to help you to reflect on your current or most recent role, the activities involved and the skills you use.
• Being Your Best - this exercise is intended to help you to articulate some of the things that excite and energise you.
• Career SWOT - a SWOT analysis is a powerful tool that can be used to support, amongst other things, career planning. Linked to a clear goal, it can enable you to optimise your skills, talents and abilities in your career project.

Career Transition - Where do I want to go?

The third stage, "Where Do I Want To Go?" aims to help you describe more accurately what you want from your next role and/or your career more generally. It includes the following exercises:

• Role factors - to help you to identify what you do and don't want in your next position, in terms of things like the type of people, culture, environment and tasks.
• "Begin with the end in mind" or "what do you want to be when you grow up?" - an exercise to help you visualise what you really want to do with your career/life.
• Perfect Day - this exercise is intended to make your ideal career role more tangible and immediate, by asking a series of questions about what your ideal working day would be like.
• Career Vision Statement - to help you summarise what you want from your work role by filling in the missing words from a template-statement.

Career Transition - How am I going to get there?

The final stage, "How Am I Going To Get There?", is designed to help you formulate and execute your plan of attack. Consequently, it contains the following exercises:

• Confrontation Matrix - combining your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to help you formulate your attack, defence, strengthening and withdrawal strategies.
• How Good Is Your Support Network? - an exercise to help you identify the types of support that you will need and from whom you are going to get it.
• Brand Strength Questionnaire - completion of a questionnaire designed to elucidate the key elements of your personal brand and the current strength of that brand.
• Brand Campaign Plan - an exercise to help you formulate an action-plan specifically designed to take your personal brand to the next level.
• SMARTER Action Planning - one final exercise in action-planning to give you an opportunity to commit to a number of energising actions, as a product of all the work that you will have done.

Please contact us now to arrange your free, no-obligation first consultation.